river deep, mountain high

More exciting outdoor-adventurousness news as promised, but first a bit of scene-setting: we went on holiday to Scotland at the end of July. It's a long old drive so we stopped off on the way to visit our friends John and Tracey at their home in Silverdale, just south of the Lake District. We were only there for a day or so but did get to do a bit of exploring, in particular the spectacular coastal location at the northern end of Morecambe Bay. 

Morecambe Bay is a vast expanse of estuarial sand and mudflats and fairly notorious for its shifting landscape and dangerous tides, and most famously (in recent times anyway) for the incident where over 20 Chinese cockle-harvesters drowned in 2004. Just to demonstrate the fickle nature of the landscape, there was until recently (properly recently as in a few weeks before we were there) a vast flat expanse of sand extending out from Silverdale Cove to the main channel of the River Kent as it emerged from its mouth a couple of miles to the north, but recent heavy rain had induced a sudden course change and the river had turned south, carved out a great gouge in the sand and created a substantial sand cliff only a couple of hundred yards from the beach, which Alys and Nia kindly posed by for scale and subsequently hilariously pretended to push their little brother off.

Despite the apparent foolhardiness of attempting such a thing, guided walks are periodically available, weather and tide conditions permitting, and a person with the grand title of the Queen's Guide To The Sands (well, presumably King's Guide these days) has the job of scoping out a safe route. As publicly-accessible walking routes go it's probably not as dangerous as the Broomway in Essex - less chance of being maimed by discarded military ordnance, for instance - but definitely not to be trifled with. It is at least still passable, though, unlike the Wadeway in Chichester Harbour where you would now disappear into a canal halfway across.

Anyway, we didn't do any of that, preferring to head home for a refreshing beer and a soak in the hot tub. The following day we headed off to continue our journey north to our destination of Hunter's Quay holiday village near Dunoon on the Cowal peninsula, which I see I mentioned here. I see that I laughingly make reference to there being no point building a bridge across from the mainland (the intervening channel being basically the confluence of Loch Long and the Firth of Clyde) as it wouldn't get much use. That may be true, but more pertinently it's a couple of miles across and would therefore be a fairly major feat of engineering, not to mention one spanning a major shipping lane. Whatever, there isn't one, and so once you've got as far as Gourock (which you do by basically heading north into Glasgow and then turning left) you are obliged to queue for a ferry. Anecdotally, and I'm not saying this justifies the cost of a bridge, the ferry terminals were pretty busy in both directions when we crossed, and by no means everyone got on the first one that showed up.

Anyway, the holiday village was perfectly nice, featuring the usual chalet-slash-static-caravan accommodation and the usual array of food and drink facilities plus some entertainment for the kids. I'm always unavoidably reminded of Hi-De-Hi in places like this but it was actually perfectly nice. More importantly a) Hazel had managed to wangle a super-cheap deal for a short break and b) a shortish drive north (no ferries required this time) takes you to the north end of Loch Lomond and the vicinity of the Arrochar Alps, some of Scotland's most southerly and therefore most easily accessible Munros. Technically the most southerly Munro is Ben Lomond, but from where we started it's rather awkwardly situated on the east side of the loch, and in any case I'd been up it before, back in about 1999.

So, emboldened by everyone's conquering of a rather wet and soggy Pen y Fan for my birthday in February I devised a walk (basically this one) that would bag two Munros and offer the possibility of a crack at The Cobbler, just short of Munro height but an interesting scrambly challenge. I had mentally earmarked that last bit as very unlikely to come off, but it's good for Plan A to be ambitious as long as there's a Plan B you can fall back on. 

There's a car park by the shores of Loch Long just outside the village of Succoth, which I expect you can make up your own jokes about - you know, Elizabeth I visiting and declaring "the mountain view enchanteth most delightfully, but the neighbouring village sucketh most egregiously", that sort of thing - anyway, point is it offers a good starting point for the walk. If you've been paying attention, though, you'll have clocked that Loch Long is a sea loch, and that therefore you are going to be obliged to gain all 3000+ of those Munro feet without a head start. Moreover, if you follow the anticlockwise route I'd devised, the usual route of ascent up Beinn Narnain, the first Munro, is a relentless direct upward slog along the remains of an old cable railway, of which only a few lumps of concrete footing remain. Once you get out of the woods the relentlessness eases off a bit and it's quite pleasant, though challenging. Eventually you arrive at a pretty intimidating wall of rock which you have to find a scrambly way up to get onto the summit plateau and bag the trig point. Beinn Narnain is 926 metres or 3038 feet and (depending which list you use) is around 257th of the 280-odd Munros on the current list.

It's not the Black Cuillin, but it is far from easy - considerably more challenging than a good few of my previous Munros, and I was and am inordinately proud of the kids for giving every impression of enjoying the whole thing and seeming engaged by the idea of coming back and doing some more in future. I should also add a word for Hazel who had sustained a badly bruised ankle in a comedy incident with a shot putt at school sports day a couple of weeks earlier but clearly didn't want to let the side down and struggled up anyway. That constraint did mean that we had to abandon the idea of bagging the day's intended second Munro, Beinn Ime, which was disappointing but which I was half-expecting before we'd even set out. 

The walk out down the valley which separates Beinn Narnain from The Cobbler is a delight, as it's a pretty good path alongside a pretty river and affords excellent views of the Cobbler's knobbly profile in particular. A bit of steep zig-zagging back through the woods and you're back at the car park. After a long and strenuous walk like that a pint is very much in order and I heartily commend to you the Village Inn in Arrochar which has excellent ale from the Fyne Ales brewery. Two things to say about Fyne Ales: firstly haha, you see what they did there, and secondly I'd had them before in a pub in Edinburgh in 2011.

Anyway, the important thing here is that this was the kids' first Munro, and the first time I'd had an opportunity to add one to my list since back before we had kids. We actually did three Scottish trips with our friends Jenny and Jim and on those trips bagged four, four and zero Munros respectively, so this was actually the first one I'd been up since 2010. My personal count now stands at fifteen. 

Route map and altitude profile are below: total distance is about twelve kilometres or seven-and-a-half miles.

Just to cap off the holiday activities, once we came to the end of our stay in Dunoon we headed back across to another quite similar holiday park just east of Edinburgh for a couple of days and spent some time doing the usual tourist-y stuff in Edinburgh including a trip down into Mary King's Close which was very interesting, and a walking tour of locations relating to JK Rowling (a former resident of Edinburgh) and the Harry Potter books. I would describe this as a commendably game attempt to get some tourist mileage out of some incredibly tenuous connections: once you've been to the site of the former cafe where she sat and wrote some of the early books you're reduced to pointing at various knobbly buildings and saying: hey, might this not have been partial inspiration for Hogwarts? Go on, squint a bit. Our tour guide was an engaging enough bloke, though, and it was pretty good fun. We didn't have time to climb Arthur's Seat but we did have time for me and Nia to have a crack at the Meadowmill parkrun on Saturday morning. Anyone fancying a bit of Scottish parkrun tourism should be aware that most if not all of the Scottish ones start at 9:30am rather than 9am. Not sure if this is a daylight thing or just a bit of bolshy being different for the sake of it.

back once again with the hill behaviour

We went for a walk up the Blorenge a couple of weeks ago; broadly similar in route and distance to the two previous walks we'd done - the slightly ill-fated (in terms of the health of my ankle and boots) lockdown one in 2021 and the one with some work colleagues all the way back in 2009. So we're not breaking any new ground here but as always there are some points of interest that are worth mentioning, and it serves as an intro to some other more significant walk stuff that we did earlier in the summer and which I'll get to in another post.

So, anyway, I don't want to rehash the content of earlier posts here but you'll recall that the Blorenge is a smallish mountain (or a largish hill, whatever you like, I'm not getting into an argument about categorisation) just outside Abergavenny, really just the steep end of the largest lobe of a sort of cloverleaf-shaped area of high ground centred just north of Blaenavon. Any walk that wants to qualify as an "ascent" in any meaningful way pretty much has to start somewhere in the vicinity of Llanfoist, and it just so happens that there's a car park at Llanfoist Crossing, at the start point of the cycle path that follows the old railway line from Llanfoist to Merthyr Tydfil along some of the bits that haven't been subsumed by the Heads Of The Valleys Road. The only drawback is that the car park is quite small and heavily used by dog walkers so it can be a bit of a bunfight finding a space. I'm not going to be That Guy and suggest you provide minor botheration to the locals by parking on a residential street as an alternative, but clearly that is a thing you could do if so inclined. 

Anyway, you're an adult, sort your own parking out. Having done that you walk up the path that goes under the old Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal and then smashes straight up the hill through the woods directly towards the summit of the Blorenge. On emerging into the open you can, if you so wish, carry on straight up, but a more scenic and less lung-busting option is to take a left turn and head for the pleasant spot of the Devil's Punchbowl, a small pond in what is presumably some sort of glacial cwm. It's apparently man-made, and surprisingly recent (circa 1960s) - it was previously just a low-lying marshy area. Apparently quite a popular wild swimming spot, although when we were there the water level was quite low and it all looked a bit green and murky.

After the brief respite of the fairly flat (even slightly downhill) walk to the Devil's Punchbowl and maybe a brief respite to take in the scenery and have a drink and a KitKat (other chocolate bars are available) you turn south-west and start uphill again, briefly meeting a minor road before turning north for the proper assault on the hill. You'll notice that the path takes a slightly indirect hook-y route before approaching the summit trig point from the north-east and you might be tempted to say: hell, I'm going to cut that corner off. To that I would say: go for it if you want, but I have done it (partly by accident) and generally found it to be a bit of an arse. I mean, you won't die, but the energy and irritation expended in pathless floundering about probably means taking the main path is a better option. You do you, though.

The summit trig point is by a big pile of rocks (which obscure it until the last second coming from the north-east) and, having bagged it and dropped off the top (we went south as this happened to be the direction that got us out of the wind) for a pork pie and a Granny Smith, the walk then drops off the summit ridge to the north-west and eventually joins up with the route of Hill's Tramroad, which includes an exciting tunnel which the kids had some fun exploring and where they shot a video for Huwie's YouTube channel. That path follows the contours round the hillside until it links back with the path up through the woods which takes you back down to where you started.

I think this is the best of the three slightly different routes: the 2009 walk included an extension to loop round the Foxhunter car park and Keeper's Pond (another popular wild swimming spot), which is all very nice but doesn't really add much apart from some lateral distance, and I think the ascent via the Devil's Punchbowl is better than the route along the canal towpath and then an uphill slog along some roads. The 2021 walk took a similar route up (with a bit of inadvertent pathless floundering as described above) but then a much more direct route down, which is fine if you're in a hurry but less interesting than the route incorporating the tramroad and tunnel.

Overall route distance was just over ten kilometres, or about six-and-a-half miles. Details below: latest in the long and varied series of altitude-graph-generating tools is Strava which my Garmin running watch is linked to: this seems not to have the random starting height discrepancy that the old phone app had, which is nice. 

the last book I read

From A Buick 8 by Stephen King.

So here's Troop D of the Pennsylvania State Police - just a bunch of regular guys trying to keep the peace and uphold the law. We're out in the sticks here so it's not any of yer high-falutin' fancy big-city crime, just the usual drunk driving and domestic violence. 

Speaking of drunk driving, one of Troop D's number, Curtis Wilcox, has recently been rubbed out while on a routine traffic stop - not by the driver of the HGV he'd pulled over but by another guy, Bradley Roach, whose addled inattention led to Curtis being smeared along the side of the HGV by his car.

Following this incident Troop D pulls together to look after Curtis' family, in particular his teenage son, Ned, understandably hit hard by his father's death. Ned starts hanging out at the police barracks, doing odd jobs, even occasionally manning the radio, and develops a curiosity about how the whole operation works and what the various rooms at the barracks contain. In particular, Ned is curious about the outbuilding known as Shed B, which appears to contain a near-mint-condition 1950s Buick Roadmaster, just sitting there in the dark. The current commanding officer, Sandy Dearborn, decides that since Ned is pretty much one of the team these days, and given his father's connection to the place (and, it later turns out, his particular connection to the Buick), Ned is entitled to hear the story.

And so we do a wibbly-wobbly dissolve to twenty-odd years previously when most of the current force, Sandy included, were fresh-faced youngsters responding to a call from, coincidentally (OR IS IT, etc.), the very same Bradley Roach, at this time running a petrol station, about a fancy-looking Buick that some mysterious long-coated dude has just abandoned on the forecourt - the dude himself slunk off round the back of the site, ostensibly to use the bathroom, and has now disappeared without trace. The guys on patrol turn up with a tow-truck and take the vehicle back to the barracks, and almost immediately clock that there is something deeply wrong with it, most obviously that the engine is a motley selection of plausibly mechanical-looking bits that don't actually connect with each other, still less function, the dashboard dials are fake, and the exhaust system appears to be made of glass. Moreover the car seems to repel dust and dirt, and even heal itself if the paintwork is scratched. [This isn't a thought that could have occurred to King in 2002 when the book was published, but it's a bit like one of those AI simulations that look a bit like people but on closer inspection have twenty-three fingers, an anus for an eye, etc.] The tow-truck deposits the Buick in Shed B and there it stays, partly because the owner is definitely not putting in a re-appearance, and partly because it's not like anyone can start it up and drive it out of there. And partly for other reasons, too.

There are early hints - beyond the car not actually being a car, I mean - that rum doings are afoot, most notably the disappearance of Curtis Wilcox's patrol partner Ennis Rafferty, who most people on the force believe disappeared while inside Shed B. This leads to some unpalatable thoughts, like: did the car eat him in some way? A pragmatic sort of omertà develops within Troop D: no blabbing of any kind about Shed B to anyone outside of the troop, family, friends, senior police, and most of all the press.

Curtis Wilcox takes a particular interest in the Buick and its behaviour, which comprises occasional spectacular shows of light and electrical interference which stops police radios from working, but also the occasional vomiting up of living or recently-living creatures definitely Not Of This Earth, including a weird insecty-bat-type-thing which Curtis does some gruesome amateur dissection on, and some plant and fish things which decompose too quickly to yield much information other that that they are weird and they stink. These are pretty grim, but at least pose no threat to humans other than putting them off their dinner. The human-sized creature that subsequently comes through does, though, since it is not only not dead but also not especially keen on becoming dead and possessed of enough intelligence, not to mention tentacles, to do something about it. The members of Troop D who happen to be on duty persuade it otherwise by messily murdering it to death with a shovel, with a bit of help from the barracks dog, who subsequently dies of a spectacular case of heartburn.

So what is going on here? The best theory Curtis and his colleagues can come up with is that the Buick is actually some sort of portal between worlds, and that whatever hellish Lovecraftian netherworld the tentacly horrors that periodically appear in Shed B came from, that's where Ennis, and subsequently an escaped prisoner who strays into the shed and whose disappearance no-one particularly mourns, have gone, very probably to be messily murdered in their turn by a host of shovel-wielding space lobsters.

No satisfyingly conclusive information about any of this has ever been forthcoming - definitive news about the car's original driver's whereabouts, how it got onto the garage forecourt in the first place given that it can't be driven, how the exchange of biological material between worlds actually works and what prompts it and the periodic light-shows - which adhere to no particular schedule and outside of which the Buick just sits there refusing to get dirty - to happen. There is a general feeling among the troop that the intensity and frequency of the episodes has reduced somewhat over the years, but the car has definitely not stopped being periodically active even twenty-plus years later.

And so Sandy and his colleagues present this to Ned and say: here, you're up to date. Bit weird, no? Ned, it turns out, is young enough and naïve enough to have been hoping for some neat tying-up of loose ends that would have explained what was going on and perhaps even offered some sort of closure to his father's premature death, and isn't especially pleased to be met with Sandy basically saying: sorry son, life isn't like that. So dissatisfied is he with this, in fact, that he decides upon a dramatic course of action: douse the Buick in gasoline and destroy it, with himself inside if necessary, thereby sealing off the conduit between worlds in some final way and perhaps heroically preventing a future Earth invasion by radioactive space shrimp or something similar.

Sandy sees a number of problems with this course of action, most obviously the prospect of Mrs. Wilcox losing a son shortly after losing a husband, but also something with wider impact: what if the Buick acts as some sort of regulator valve that keeps something in balance between worlds, maybe even between universes, nay indeed multiverses, and whose unexpected removal would have unforeseen and perhaps catastrophic consequences? 

And so Sandy and a couple of the other troopers have to thwart Ned's ill-conceived plan; unfortunately by the time they get to Ned he is already sitting in the Buick's driver's seat with an open can of gasoline. Moreover all this excitement has "woken" the Buick and it starts to become active. And so not only does Sandy have to rescue Ned from his own self-destructive actions, he also has to do so before the portal fully opens and they all get sucked over to an airless alien planet where they will die.

You'll recall from the review of Cell in 2012 and a couple of other posts that Stephen King used to be my main man book-wise, but that Cell was only the second book of his (re-reads aside) I'd read in about 15 years. Well you can make that three in over 25 years now as I haven't read one since Cell (you would after all have heard about it here if I had). For a writer as prolific over such a long period as King it's inevitable that various connections to other books present themselves - here's a few:

• Most obviously, before starting the book at least, the fact of the central plot device being a car, moreover a car to which there's more than meets the eye, is highly reminiscent of Christine, one of the clunkier novels from King's classic 1975-1990 period. 
• Once you actually start reading, though, From A Buick 8 is clearly more in the slightly science-fiction genre occupied by The Tommyknockers, another book where critical opinion is, at best, divided. That book has weird tentacly aliens and also a portal between planets via which a small boy gets teleported to an alien planet only to be rescued at the end of the book. The other thing the two books have in common is a relentless darkness and nihilism - weird shit happens, there's no satisfying explanation, we probably wouldn't understand anyway, the best we can hope for is just to endure as best we can and hope that the bad things eventually run down like an old battery. In the case of The Tommyknockers the obvious cod-psychology explanation for the tone is that it was written in the depths of one of King's periods of drug addiction, with From A Buick 8 it was published after King's recovery from being run down by a van in rural Maine in 1999, a collision that nearly killed him. Aside from the general tone, the death of Curtis Wilcox at the hands of an inattentive driver is a pretty close fictional rendering of what happened to King.
• Those thoughts lead tangentially to a non-King book, Roadside Picnic; the Buick here is a bit like the artefacts that are strewn across The Zones there: utterly opaque to our attempts to understand them, mysterious in function and occasionally randomly deadly to humans.
• Back to King - the brief episode where the troopers have to subdue the half-tree/half-squid alien creature, and in particular the bit where we are briefly offered a glimpse out of its multiple eyes at its hideous human murderers coming at it with a selection of blunt implements, is reminiscent both of the brief switch to Craig Toomy's viewpoint (more like Craig Loony, amirite) in The Langoliers, and also of the creepy short story I Am The Doorway from 1978's excellent Night Shift collection. 
• Finally, Ned's inability to accept the inexplicable and arbitrary nature of what the Buick does and his desire to probe into the mystery himself, is similar to what happened to the narrator's son in another excellent King short story, The Jaunt, from 1985's Skeleton Crew collection. I won't spoil it for you, but it does not end particularly well for anyone, least of all the boy.

A bit like Cell, this is probably a fairly minor work in King's gargantuan oeuvre, but it's good fun nonetheless. There is just a sense of the various occurrences of weird freaky shit getting vomited up out of the car's trunk getting a bit repetitive in the book's mid-section, and the switch from the car being - seemingly at least - a dumb conduit for stuff to a sentient entity capable of malign actions like bolting doors to prevent Sandy getting to Ned at the book's climax felt like it slightly undermined the book's logic just to serve a convenient narrative purpose (i.e. adding some tension and peril). Like pretty much anything King's ever written it is relentlessly gripping, though, and I raced through its 400+ pages in only a handful of days, helped by going on a camping trip which provided more reading time than usual.

the last book I read

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox.

Otto and Sophie Bentwood are a couple of forty-ish middle-class New Yorkers, living in a nice apartment in Brooklyn full of nice stuff, eating nice food and generally having a nice life, albeit a bit removed from what coarse earthy proletarian types like you and me might call the "real" world.

Reality intervenes, though, as it always does - Charlie, Otto's partner in his legal practice, wants to dissolve their partnership and this (hardly surprisingly) has made their personal relationship a bit frosty, especially with all the inevitable jockeying for who gets to keep which lucrative clients.

Around the same time, Sophie is feeding one of the various stray cats that roam the local area and is unexpectedly bitten quite severely on the hand. Rather than do what normal non-neurotic people do and go to a doctor for treatment and perhaps a rabies jab, Sophie instead binds the wound up and does her best to ignore the swelling and constant ache. 

So we can see a theme developing here: the Bentwoods' nice cosy middle-class life being invaded and disrupted by external "real-world" factors. Sure enough more weird shit starts to happen: a wordless late-night phone call, which turns out to be from Charlie (and which prompts a slightly bizarre late-night meet-up between him and Sophie while Otto is asleep), a rock being thrown through a window while the Bentwoods are at a party at a friend's house, a tense episode where a black man calls at the apartment and requests the use of the Bentwood's phone and eventually some money, and finally their discovery on visiting their holiday house on Long Island that it's been burgled and vandalised and the perpetrators have taken a nice big shit on the lounge carpet.

Eventually all of this starts to take its toll on the Bentwoods' equilibrium: Sophie has a shouty exchange with her friend Tanya who's phoned up for a gossip about her (Tanya's) latest love affair, and Otto angrily throws a bottle of ink at the wall after Charlie phones him up wanting to sort out some details of the dissolution of their business partnership.

So what are we to make of this? Has the disruption to their hermetically-sealed lives allowed the Bentwoods to get back in touch with their actual feelings? Or have they just been pushed over the edge and GONE MENTAL (and possibly, in Sophie's case, RABID)?

You won't get a definitive answer on any of that from me, as it happens, as this is one of those books I felt must have some significance that just eluded my grasp. It'd probably be too harsh to describe it as just a book about annoying privileged people being privileged and annoying, but I couldn't help but admit to a pang of sympathy with whoever it was took a colossal dump on their living room carpet. To put it another way, it's a very skilled writer who can make a novel work that contains pretty much no likeable characters whatsoever, and for all that Paula Fox clearly was (she died in 2017) a very skilled writer I'm not sure she quite manages it here. It's very clever and perceptive in its own way, though, and I can see the sense of the comparisons to John Updike; I guess I just found it a bit cold and uninvolving.

One of the things the Guardian obituary linked above doesn't mention, incidentally, is that via her daughter Linda, whom she gave up for adoption, Paula Fox is Courtney Love's grandmother. Moreover, if certain lurid but plausible showbiz rumours are true, Marlon Brando may have been Courtney Love's grandfather. 

Desperate Characters was filmed in 1971, starring Shirley Maclaine as Sophie and Kenneth Mars as Otto. This seems odd to me as the only two things I've seen Kenneth Mars in were the two Mel Brooks films The Producers and Young Frankenstein, in both of which he does a scenery-chewing turn as a comical nutter. I'm sure he was an actor of range and subtlety if the part demanded it, though. My Flamingo paperback copy contains an introduction by Jonathan Franzen, whose advocacy of Fox and of Desperate Characters in particular was instrumental in its being reissued after many years out of print. This provides another instance of a book on this list carrying a foreword by another author who appears on the same list; a non-exhaustive list of the handful of previous instances appears at the end of the 2018 review of True Grit.

the last book I read

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

Cayce Pollard, an American woman in her early thirties, is a sort of "coolhunter" for hire by various companies, mostly advertising agencies. But why would they want to hire her? Well, she has some sort of spidey-sense, somewhat akin to an allergic reaction, to advertising material (mainly the graphical sort, logos etc.) that "works" or doesn't, which makes her highly useful. It's a bit like the thing that Colin Laney has in Gibson's earlier novel Idoru, but more obviously commercially applicable. 

Cayce has been hired by an achingly hip advertising agency called Blue Ant to vet some logo ideas - basically they get a nod of approval or an outbreak of hives and then have to go away and re-think accordingly. While she's in London she's staying in the apartment of her friend Damien, a documentary film-maker, who's off working abroad somewhere. She's also keeping up with one of her hobbies - monitoring updates to a series of viral online short films known among the cognoscenti as "the footage" whose origin is completely mysterious but around which a whole internet subculture has sprung up speculating about the identity of the maker and What It All Means.

Cayce has a couple of meetings at Blue Ant to do her original job, including a couple of odd encounters with a woman called Dorotea who seems weirdly ill-disposed towards her for reasons she can't fathom, since they've never met before. Having met Blue Ant's head honcho, who goes by the tremendous name of Hubertus Bigend, Cayce finds that he's also quite interested in the footage, wants to get to the bottom of its mysteries, and wants someone appropriately hip and groovy and in-the-know (i.e. Cayce) to make use of his effectively unlimited budget to investigate.

Cayce is slightly dubious about the involvement of The Man sullying the purity of the footage-makers' art, and about whether discovery of the mechanism of its production will ruin it for everyone and preclude further footage being created and distributed, but her curiosity and the lure of Bigend's unlimited budget eventually get the better of her. She starts trawling the chat archives for clues, and, in an apparently unrelated event, has a random encounter on the street with some shady characters who collect old artifacts related to computing: one is constructing an industrial sculpture out of scaffolding and old ZX81s, one is collecting Curta calculating machines. 

Cayce's technical contacts peruse the footage closely and determine that there is some sort of digital watermark in some of it that may conceal a message or some other form of information. At the same time one of her contacts from the random street meeting comes up with an e-mail address which she uses to contact someone in Russia - are they the maker of the footage? Cayce is invited to fly out to Moscow to meet her e-mail contact, who turns out to be one of a pair of twin sisters, this one mainly concerned with distribution and promotion of the footage, the other - largely non-verbal after being injured by an explosive device in the terrorist attack that dispatched her parents some years earlier - does the actual video-editing, with the help of a whole warehouse full of assistants, who massage the original footage (most of it just found from security cameras and the like rather than purposefully shot) into the grainily enigmatic forms posted to the internet, as well as handling all the embedding of the hidden digital watermarks and similar techno-nerdery.

Having had a fairly cordial session with Stella, the more chatty of the two sisters, Cayce then has an unexpected encounter with Dorotea back at her hotel and agrees to a chat over a drink - foolishly as it turns out, as Dorotea slips her a Mickey Finn and the next thing Cayce knows she's waking up in some unknown building in the middle of nowhere. Making good her escape, only to then find herself traversing some sort of desert wasteland, she is the rescued by some of her fellow footage-hunters, including Bigend and some shady-looking guys who turn out to have connections to the Russian mafia and also have an interest in the footage, for largely incomprehensible reasons. Cayce is invited not to worry herself too much about these reasons and is rewarded with a large sum of money, most of which she gives away to good causes, like the financing of a really enormous structure made of of scaffolding and ZX81s.

In fact, largely incomprehensible reasons feature quite prominently in the blizzard of exposition that occupies the last few chapters, just as they did at the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive. What Dorotea's motivations are for doing any of the things she does throughout the course of the book, for instance, are entirely opaque to me, apart from that she seems to switch sides multiple times. This isn't hugely important after the fun and excitement of what's gone before, but it chafed me slightly more at the end of this book, set in a largely recognisable contemporary world without sci-fi attachments, than it did in a world featuring fully immersive virtual reality, infinitely prolongable life-spans and space elevators, I suppose because that latter world is one I would expect to find baffling in many respects anyway.

The whole idea of mysterious grainy video footage of unknown origin suddenly emerging into popular culture is highly reminiscent of David Cronenberg's Videodrome, though the footage here is generally benign in its effects, in contrast to Videodrome's nastiness. There's certainly no suggestion of the sort of weird effects induced by the video footage in Ring or Infinite Jest. As always Gibson has an effortless grasp of popular culture and the fascination of ineffable concepts like coolness, as well as a nerdy fascination with technology and its design. Cayce Pollard continues Gibson's line of cool, enigmatic, slightly dangerous female protagonists, following on from Molly Millions from the Neuromancer series (aka the Sprawl trilogy) and Chevette Washington from the Bridge trilogy.

Overall this probably isn't as good as some of his earlier stuff, but it's still pretty good. Neuromancer and Virtual Light (each a gateway into a trilogy, as is Pattern Recognition) are still the best places to start.